Shedding body fat with minimum muscle loss: a better goal

Image via WikipediaShedding body fat with minimum muscle loss: a better goal: "Shedding body fat with minimum muscle loss: a better goal"

Losing weight can actually be a bad thing, especially if you are doing it at the expense of lean tissue like muscle.

Your body’s total weight: includes body fat; lean tissue like muscle; your internal organs like the heart, lungs, and liver; the food and liquid currently passing through your digestive tract; water retained by body tissue; and skeletal material like bones and their connective tissue. In a healthy female of average weight, bones make up 12 percent of total body weight, muscle/lean tissue about 35 percent and body fat about 27 percent. The remaining body weight is skin, connective tissue, tendons, blood, organs and so forth. For health, a good percentage of body fat is around 15 to 20% for females. It's been determined a healthy body fat percentage between 17% - 24% for women is normal.

ncreasing your ratio of muscle to fat can make you look more in-shape, even though the scale may say you are heavier, as both vary in appearance. Muscle makes you appear leaner, while fat just makes you look fat. Extreme calorie restriction can leave you with little muscle mass, which translates into a flat, boney appearance.

Women often complain gain in weight with increase in age irrespective of a consistent dietary intake. The reason here is, as we age there is a natural tendency to lose muscle and we also are less vigorous in our physical activity, which results in further muscle loss. This loss of muscle tissue results in a decreasing metabolic rate. Lose 5 pounds of muscle and your calories burned per 24 hours decreases by about 250 calories. While this may not sound like much, it adds up. If you continue to eat like you did when you were younger, you will gain a pound of fat in about 14 days. Over a 20 week period you will gain 10 pounds. The key to getting rid of accumulated body fat is to get back your youthful metabolism by getting back your muscle. With a proper exercise stimulus that dormant muscle can be reclaimed.

Related articles

• Can Muscle Turn Into Fat? (everydayhealth.com)
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10 cool add-ins for Office 2007 and 2010 | TechRepublic

Image via Wikipedia10 cool add-ins for Office 2007 and 2010 | TechRepublic: "10 cool add-ins for Office 2007 and 2010"

1: Everything

Although Office 2007 and 2010 have improved search capabilities, you still might want to take a look at Everything, by VoidTools.

2: E-mail Follow-up

E-mail Follow-up goes a step further. It lets you set a response time when you create the email; if the recipient hasn’t responded by the allotted response time, this nifty little add-in reminds you that you’re still waiting on a response.

3: More Add-in

More Add-in lets you quickly and easily hide Word text by creating collapsible sections. Anyone who creates long documents comprising the same blocks of text will find this add-in useful.

4: FreeFileViewer

FreeFileViewer lets you view a number of formats so you need only one viewer. Using FreeFileViewer, you can read a PDF, a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, and more. You can even play music files.

5: ASAP Utilities

This Excel add-in is probably one of the most popular — and it has endured. ASAP Utilities is the turn-to application for both frequent and infrequent users

6: Proposal Pack Wizard

Using merge technology, Proposal Pack Wizard lets you quickly assemble documents. It comes with more than 800 templates and 1,300 pages of sample text.

7: VisualBee

VisualBee is a bit different. It lets you enhance an existing presentation. When you run VisualBee, it analyses the presentation’s text and structure and tries to improve what you’ve done on your own. It doesn’t get everything right, but it’ll generate a few keepers — and you can easily discard what you don’t like. The bank of images alone is worth the download.

8: iSpring Pro

iSpring Pro converts a PowerPoint presentation into an online Flash presentation (.swf files). For the most part, it converts everything in a presentation: animation, transitions, videos, audio, the works.

9: Pop-up Excel Calendar

Pop-up Excel Calendar lets you insert and configure a datepicker control without writing code. Simply click the Pop-up Calendar tab, which is added to the Ribbon, insert the calendar, check a few settings, and you’re done.

10: Fuzzy Duplicate Finder for Microsoft Excel

I’m often asked for easy ways to clean up Excel data, and I’ve finally found something I can recommend. Fuzzy Duplicate Finder works with Excel versions 2000 through 2007. It helps you find all those fuzzy duplicates — those mistakes that don’t always show up as mistakes.